Why Eating Out in Hong Kong Could be Damaging to Your Health Part 2 – What’s the Story with Fats?

Why Eating Out in Hong Kong Could be Damaging to Your Health

Part 2 – What’s the Story with Fats?

Date 31/12/19

Written by: Miles Price, Functional Medicine Practitioner & Clinical Nutritionist

There has been so much confusion for so long about fats and their impact on health. The devil is always in the detail when it comes to research and the chemical compositions of fats. Looking into the compositions will tell you a lot more about the relative benefits of each of the saturated fats used traditionally in cooking. In most animal saturated fats, not all of the fats are saturated. In fact, over 50% of the fats are monounsaturated, the kind of fat found in avocado that has been shown to improve cholesterol markers and protect against heart disease and insulin resistance¹. Additional research has shown that we need to look closer as to how saturated fat affects cholesterol directly with particular attention to the low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particle size.

It is important to note that LDL particle size is an important risk factor to heart disease, and the smaller and denser the LDL particle the greater the risk (3 x greater risk) of heart disease². The larger, more fluffy the particle the less the disease risk is. With saturated fat consumption it has been shown that LDL particle size changes from small to large size³. What makes particle sizes smaller? Eating a diet rich in carbohydrates and trans-fats.

In fact in one the largest reviews of published studies (76 studies in total, looking at 643,000 participants), researchers found no link between heart disease and eating saturated fats, and even the opposite is true – reducing saturated fat had no effect on death from heart disease⁴.

However even with all these studies governments and mainstream media still bang the same drum, consume low fat, consume high polyunsaturated fats, high carb diets, and because of this mantra, the food and beverage industry is reluctant to change tune to switch back to traditional saturated fats for cooking with.

How bad is the situation in Hong Kong and what can be done to improve it? Continue to Part 3 of Why Eating Out in Hong Kong Could be Damaging to Your Health here

Missed Part 1? Understand the history behind the ubiquitous use of toxic cooking oils here

References:

1. Monounsaturated Fatty Acids and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease: Synopsis of the Evidence Available from Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3546618/

2. Low-Density Lipoprotein Subclass Patterns and Risk of Myocardial Infarction

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/374290

3. Change in dietary saturated fat intake is correlated with change in mass of large low-density-lipoprotein particles in men. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9583838
4. Association of Dietary, Circulating, and Supplement Fatty Acids With Coronary Risk: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

https://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/1846638/association-dietary-circulating-supplement-fatty-acids-coronary-risk-systematic-review